Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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This is episode 15: Hogs and Snakes. On November 21, 1988, hunters walking through flat damp brush off of rural Corkscrew Road in Lee County were hot on the trail of a team of wild hogs. The two men had been tracking hoof prints for miles in the isolated Florida landscape. Finally, they cornered the pigs in a large clearing surrounded by cypress tree heads.
It was muggy and muddy, and the men were ready to aim their muzzles and move on. But just as the hunters got within range of the hogs, they realized the pigs were unusually huddled together and digging into something in the ground. With each step towards whatever the animals were rooting through, the men began to see shreds of what looked like rags laying around.
It wasn't until they shooed the hogs away and were standing over the ravaged ground that they realized the hogs had not been eating trash or another animal's carcass. They'd been feeding on the upper half of a human body. A few hours after the hunters' discovery, Lee County Sheriff's Office detective Tom Cantinos parked his patrol car on the side of a dirt road off of Corkscrew Road.
The hog hunters escorted him and another deputy into the Cypress clearing. Corkscrew was a waste. I mean, there's nothing out there. So I think it took me a while to find where this place was, the actual location. I remember it was on the north side of Corkscrew. I had to walk into, you know, the field or Cypress heads or whatever it was to where deputies were. You know, I remember seeing...
Tom is now retired from the sheriff's office, but he remembers the details of this horrific crime scene well.
The first thing he noticed was that the hogs had pulled the human remains out of what looked like a purposefully dug hole in the ground. When Tom got close to it, he saw the body in the hole was encased in cement. You know, there was like a hole where the hogs had rooted around. I seem to remember either palm fronds or pine needles or grass. So it wasn't like I walked up and saw this slab of concrete that had cracked open. It was covered with concrete.
earth or weeds or grass or pine needles or palm fronds. So it wasn't apparent that there was an encasement of concrete underneath the top layer of covering. You know, when you bury a body, regardless of what you're burying it in, the body decomposes and it creates gas and, you know, you're going to get this expansion of human fluids. And that's what kind of opened up the earth.
for these hogs to come rooting around smelling death and starting to pull out bones that had, I think the hunters even was like, I think these were animal bones. And then I saw that there were clothes on the animal bones and says, well, animals don't have clothes. So I think this is something more than just animal bones. It was definitely more than just animal bones. The remains belonged to a white male in his late 30s or early 40s.
Tom and the rest of the crime scene investigators spent hours processing the makeshift grave. At first sight, you could tell the body had been decomposing for weeks. Tom sent the remains off to the medical examiner's office, and the next day they got a positive ID. The dead man, still wearing a pair of cowboy boots and an expensive watch, was 43-year-old Eric Dawson.
He'd been shot execution-style in the back of the head with a .22 caliber handgun, then thrown in the hole and covered with concrete. The killer had come prepared and counted on Florida rainstorms creating the perfect catalyst for Eric's body to become entombed in the landscape. Back when Eric was killed, you know, you need water to mix with concrete. Well, September, it's pretty wet out there. You dig down a foot into Florida soil in September,
you're going to hit water. So they already had water net available on site, so all they do is bring their bag of concrete, dig a hole that's going to fill up with water, put the body in it. I think there was some cinder blocks that they tried to weight down. I think we had a couple of cinder blocks too that were found from the scene too. So it was obviously somebody that was in the construction business to bring concrete blocks and sackcrete and shovels and what have you.
At the time, Tom knew vaguely that Eric was a missing person. But since September, Tom assumed what so many other people had, which was that the reportedly shady land developer had simply skipped town. Now that Tom knew Eric was a murder victim, he started his homicide investigation. And his first stop was to break the news to Susan and the Dawson children. At some point, I do remember meeting Susan Dawson and her parents.
three very young children back then. I mean, we had to start from Eric's life. What was he doing down here in Lee County that may have resulted or did result in his murder here in Lee County? So we had to start somewhere and Susan was the best place to start. When Jason found out about what had happened to his dad and that he'd been on his own land for two months, rotting, he was devastated. At just 11 years old, Jason spiraled in the aftermath, unable to deal with the loss.
I acted out. I was a little asshole and a lot of people suffered. Got in trouble at school, got in trouble with friends, just dealing with that. And I think the one thing that saved me was playing basketball. It was probably the worst of the bunch as it pertained to reacting to what happened. And of course my sister acted out and my brother did too. I mean, I think my brother...
He had to step up and be a man. Robert Dawson, Barbara, and Susan know about this podcast and support Jason interviewing with me, but they personally didn't want to be interviewed for the show. A few years after Eric's murder, the family moved away from Southwest Florida, but Jason returned as an adult. He says it just became too unbearable for his mother and siblings to live in Fort Myers, mostly because of the constant news reports about his dad.
A lot of those reports came from people like Sheldon Zoldan, a former real estate and business reporter for the Fort Myers News Press. Sheldon published a lot of copy about Eric Dawson, labeling him not only a murder victim, but he really played up the fact that Eric also was an alleged swindler. Here's Sheldon to explain.
Back then it was fairly a new phenomena that Southwest Florida was being discovered and there were, you know, a lot of developments going on and a lot of people here trying to make money. You know, he knew what he was doing, no doubt, I think, and I think he knew what kind of trouble he was in. But why he would go out there like that, I don't know.
You know, being found with a bullet to the back of the head and being encased in concrete was certainly the big thing that caught everybody's attention. It just was not a regular old homicide by any means.
It was clear to everyone in Southwest Florida that Eric Dawson had made his fair share of enemies. Most of them were people who'd lost large sums of money with Eric's investments. There were even rumors that Eric owed money to men in Detroit, and his death was a result of a mob execution. Sheldon says that rumor sold a lot of newspapers.
The mob connection to Detroit was pretty sexy and all that. It's one of those mysteries where there's so, you know, whodunit, there's so many different people who could have done it. Lee County Sheriff's Detective Tom Cantinos had to wade through the salacious rumors and every inch of Eric's financial history, which was incredibly confusing stuff. There were just so many corporations and shell companies that Eric was involved in.
in finding out who he was associated with, you know, who were his partners, who were his investors. And it was very, it was very difficult to figure out who was who and who did what and how and, you know, who really owned a piece of property. Suspects were popping up everywhere. And with the pool of potential perpetrators growing each day, Tom made the decision to start with what the evidence was telling him.
While he looked into that, he handed over the meticulous task of peeling away layers of Eric's real estate schemes to investigators and lawyers at the state attorney's office. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a prosecutor. And we're dealing with a lot of legal documents. So we really needed the resource of attorneys to help us understand contracts and documents properly.
So it was decided that the state attorney's office would dedicate an investigator, the sheriff's office would dedicate an investigator. We would work out of the state attorney's office where we would have seasoned prosecutors. And we had some very seasoned prosecutors that were at our beck and call if we had legal questions about any of the documents we were looking at. So we had kind of like a little task force created for this investigation.
Tom's first hurdle back in 1988 was that the evidence in the case was slim. Eric had gone to the Corkscrew Land to show someone the property. That we know for sure. The question was, who was it that had called him Friday afternoon? Nobody knew. According to Tom, the number that had called Eric's office line led back to nowhere. So he then had to turn to Eric's abandoned car for clues. But suspiciously, that too was a dead end.
It was odd. You know, the seat was up, the car was clean. There was no lift. I mean, it was just so many little things that were so out of place, but we were never able to tie it to anyone or any reason why it was what it was. But the thing that was significant to us is that
We knew that Eric did not drive it there because the seat, when it was found, was all the way up. You know, like the steering wheel would have been in someone's chest, which Eric, being a bigger man, had to have the seat all the way back. So we knew someone, it was not Eric who left the car there. And it was little things like that that said, okay, you know, who would have driven the car that needed the seat that far up? Or was it a fact that they pushed the car, the seat forward,
looking in the backseat, making sure they didn't leave anything behind that could be used as evidence. So, you know, we had a lot of ideas and thoughts on that car. We looked at that car pretty good and didn't find any evidence that helped us. Tom's last option was to start eliminating the people closest to Eric as suspects. The only person we eliminated as a suspect was Susan Dawson. You know, she was a stay-at-home mom.
and Eric took care of everything else, and she had no knowledge of anything that Eric was doing. I came to realize that Susan really had, like, she was, had no understanding or idea of Eric's business dealings. I mean, every name that we came across was a potential suspect.
only because of the business dealings that they had with Eric. And we realized that it had to have been, that his death had to have been part of a scheme or business dealing that went bad. I thought Eric, you know, I thought he was a crook, you know. But then it seemed like Eric really wanted to make something work. He wasn't out to steal from people. He wanted to be a successful businessman.
I think he just got tied in with the wrong crowd and was way over his head. To figure out who that wrong crowd might have been, Susan told Tom to talk with the one man who knew everything about everyone when it came to doing business in Fort Myers, Eric's largest investor, Phil Hawley.
Tom was already one step ahead of Susan's suggestion, though. He knew Phil and his sons had initially helped search for Eric back in September. And Tom had learned that they'd been the source of the rumor that Eric had fled Fort Myers. I think that narrative was being pushed by the Hollies of, Susan, we're sorry, but, you know, Eric took the money and left you. And, you know, we'll go out and try and find him.
You know, oops, here we go, we found them at the airport. Which back then, the airport wasn't that big and that busy at the time. By the end of week one of his investigation and reviewing some of Eric's financial documents, Tom zeroed in on the prominent Fort Myers family. And then we slowly started realizing that there was people or a person that seemed to be more involved in gaining more control of Eric's investments.
We started focusing on the Hollies.
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Tom Cantinos learned that immediately after Eric Dawson disappeared on September 9th, 1988, Phil Hawley and some of his sons helped Susan Dawson clean out Eric's office in Fort Myers. According to a deposition with Susan, Phil had convinced her to fold Enterprising Developments Inc. because the monthly rent was going to be due and Eric clearly wasn't around to pay it.
Susan said in her bewilderment over her husband's disappearance, she trusted Phil to take care of Eric's interests. Fast forward two months to November 1988, and according to the Dawsons, the Hollies had stopped coming around Susan and the kids. They were very supporting, but the moment that the body was found, that's when everything changed. It was a 180-degree turn of attitudes, events, relationships.
They didn't come around as much? It stopped immediately, the moment that the body was found. Tom Cantinos found that strange, but not that strange. It was common knowledge within weeks of Eric's body being found that the one family who stood the most to gain financially from Eric's death was the Hollies.
Because Eric's financial records and land deals were so convoluted, it took the state attorney's office and the sheriff's office several months to get through it all. Tom interviewed Phil Hawley and his sons a few times, but they all denied any involvement in Eric's death. They insisted Eric was killed by the Detroit mob. But by April of 1989, Tom had found damning evidence against the Hawley family.
First, Phil had appointed himself president of Back Bay Condo Club after Eric disappeared, which gave him financial control of the Fort Myers Beach Land Project. Second, Tom learned that eight days before Eric vanished, Phil and his family members filed a quit-claim deed in the Lee County Land Records Department.
That document transferred Eric's ownership of a 72-acre tract of land worth nearly $2.5 million to one of Phil's companies, Caribbean Industries International. A quitclaim deed is a legal document that transfers someone's ownership stake of real estate from one party to another. It requires the signatures of both the true owner and the person the land is going to.
The quick claim deed filed at the records office had Eric's signature and signatures belonging to a credit bureau employee and two of Phil's sons. I found that actual deed. It's on our website if you want to take a look. It was officially processed by the Lee County Land Records clerk on September 6th, 1988, three days before Eric vanished.
Tom knew from interviewing dozens of Eric's friends, real estate lawyers, and office staff that he never once mentioned giving any land to Phil. Tom and the state attorney's office were convinced that Eric's signature on the quitclaim deed was fake. On April 1st, 1989, Tom served two search warrants simultaneously. One was a raid on Phil's home.
It was a well-coordinated effort to do a search warrant because we didn't want them to destroy anything. I do remember seeing Phil there at the house. One of the things I remember most is that Phil had this huge belt buckle, and the belt buckle had what it looked like to be a little .22, a little Derringer in it or on it. A gun? Yeah, in his belt buckle. And...
I looked at it and I said, "Phil, is that a real .22 in your belt?" And he goes, "Yeah, it was a real Derringer .22." We knew it was a .22 that was recovered from the skull of Eric. So we knew the ballistics, there was the caliber. So I said, "Phil, is that a .22 Derringer?" And he said, "Yeah." And I said, "I think I'm going to take that as evidence." Well, it turned out, it was just that weird that he's carrying around a little .22 Derringer in his belt buckle. That is weird. But we took that.
The gun wasn't a match for the bullet that killed Eric, but Tom found other strange things inside Phil's house that indicated the Hollies had plans to absorb all of Eric's properties and most importantly, had anticipated Eric was going to disappear. He had like five or six huge safes in his house and I said, "Phil, open up these safes." And you know, he wouldn't comply initially.
And I said, "I'm going to drill it. I'm going to ruin your safes. I'm going to drill your safes. Open them up." So he eventually opened them up and there we found hundreds of, was it Caribbean LLC or Caribbean something or other? I can't remember the name because there's so many different names. These stock certificates by the hundreds with that name on it that were in the safe.
that was in the name of this property on Corkscrew Caribbean Limited Inc. or something like that. So he already had stock certificates printed by the hundreds or dozens in a safe with the ownership rights of the Corkscrew property already on them? Yes. Yes. While Tom was searching Phil's home, a second search was underway at the credit bureau office in Fort Myers.
Lee County investigators there found more incriminating evidence that the Hollies had falsely placed Eric's signature on the quit claim deed. We learned that the filing of that deed was actually a photocopy of the deed. It wasn't an original. We ended up having probable cause to do a search warrant
at the Hawley's Credit Bureau of Business, which was in downtown Fort Myers. And we went in there and we took everything. And we had boxes and files of every business record. And through those records, we started finding these slips of paper that had an Eric Dawson signature. But we knew that they were photocopies because there was like one after another after another. And they were cut little strips of paper and they were cut to the size of a signature block where you would
Copy a signature, you know, take scissors and cut around it and try and put it on another document, photocopy it that way. They did a lot of practicing before they got what they thought was a right document because the clerk accepted it. In the land records office? In the land records. Something else disturbing was the fact that the Hawley family owned a construction business. Deputies found sacks of concrete piled at the credit bureau office.
Did you think it was odd, though, that there's concrete at a credit bureau business that does financial stuff? No, because I forgot which one it was. I think Danny was in the construction business. And the Hawley's businesses all seemed to intertwine with one another. So I wasn't surprised that there were construction materials at the Hawley. I did say, what you're thinking, why is there concrete? You know, I think it was sackcrete, you know, bags of concrete.
Crime scene techs seized the cement found around Eric's body. I wanted the concrete, and can we show that the aggregate contained in the concrete at the grave site was similar to the aggregate in composition of bags of cement at the Hawley's, or any place, Hawley's place of business. But at the time, Tom says law enforcement could not positively match the samples.
Tom never found a murder weapon at the crime scene or in Phil's home, so he knew his case was circumstantial at best.
And the prosecutor just said that there's nothing other than stealing the property. There's nothing to say who, because you just can't say the family killed Dawson. I mean, we had to say somebody had to, who's the person that did that? And we were never able to answer that question for the prosecutors, which is why they won the argument on why we couldn't bring murder charges.
What prosecutors did agree to pursue were multiple felony forgery and land theft charges against Phil Hawley and three of his adult sons. The state attorney's office in Lee County accused the Hawleys of illegally stealing Eric's land with a fake deed. That announcement sparked one of the most high-profile trials in Southwest Florida history and revealed a lot more about Phil Hawley than anyone knew.
I'll break it all down next in episode 16. Copy and paste. Listen right now.
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